"That is a very fair instance of the way in which the pursuit of art is regarded among our solid classes—as distinctly a trade for an adventurer. It will be a long time before we alter that. But the truth is that this kind of conventionalism is what makes us so stupid a nation. We have no sort of taste for simplicity in life. A man who lived in a cottage, occupied in quiet and intellectual pursuits, would be held to be a failure, even if he lived in innocent happiness to the age of eighty. My own firm belief is that this is all wrong. It opens up all sorts of obscure and bewildering questions as to why we are sent into the world at all; but my idea is that we are meant to be happy if we can, and that a great many people miss happiness, because they have not the courage to pursue it in their own way. I cannot believe myself that the complicated creature, so frail of frame, so limitless in dreams and hopes, is the result of a vortex. I cannot believe that we can be created except by a power that in a certain degree resembles ourselves. If we have remote dreams of love and liberty, of justice and truth, I believe that those ideas must exist in a sublime degree in the mind of our Maker. I believe, on the whole, though there are many difficulties in the way of the theory, that life is meant for most of us to be an educative process; that we are meant to quit the world wiser, nobler, more patient than we entered it; why the whole business is so intolerably slow, why we are so hampered by traditions and instincts that retard the process, I cannot conceive; but my belief is that we must as far as possible choose a course which leads us in the direction of the thoughts that we conceive to be noble and true. We may make mistakes, we may wander sadly from the way, but I believe that it is our duty, our best hope, to try and perceive what it is that God is trying to teach us. Now, our choice must be to a great extent a matter of temperament. Some men like work, activity, influence, relations with others. Well, if they sincerely believe that they are meant to pursue these things, it is their duty to do so. Others, like myself, seem to be gifted with a sensitiveness of perception, an appreciation of beauty in many forms. I cannot believe that such an organisation is given me fortuitously, and that I am merely meant to suppress it. Of course the same argument could be used sophistically by a man with strong sensual passions and appetites, who could similarly urge that he must be intended to gratify them. But such gratification leads both to personal disaster and to the increase of unhappiness in the race. Such instincts as I recognise in myself seem to me to do neither. I believe that poets, artists, and musicians, to say nothing of religious teachers, have effected almost more for the welfare of the race than statesmen, patriots, and philanthropists. Of course the necessary work of the world has got to be done; but my own belief is that a good deal more than is necessary is done, because people pursue luxury rather than simplicity. I recognise to the full the duty of work; but, to be quite honest, I think that a serious man who will preach simplicity, disseminate ideas, suggest possibilities of intellectual and artistic pleasure, can do a very real work. Such a man must be disinterested; he must not desire fame or influence; he must be content if he can sow the seeds of beauty in a few minds.
"Now the Maudle and Postlethwaite school are not concerned with anything of the kind. They merely desire to make a sort of brightly polished mirror of their minds, capable of reflecting all sorts of beautiful effects, and this is an essentially effeminate thing to do, because it exalts the appreciation of sensation above all other aims; that is the pursuit of artistic luxury, and it is, as you say, quite inconsistent with good citizenship. But I do not think that my own theory is in the least inconsistent with good citizenship. I have no admiration for the citizenship the end of which is to make a comfortable corner for oneself at the expense of others; I do not at all believe that every man of ideals is bound to take a part in the administration of the community. We can easily have too many administrators; and that ends in the dismal slough of municipal politics. After all, we must nowadays all be specialists, and a man has as much right to specialise in beauty as he has to specialise in Greek Grammar. In fact a specialist in Greek Grammar has as his ultimate view the clearer and nicer appreciation of the shades of Greek expression, and is merely serving a high ideal of mental refinement. It seems to me purely conventional to accept as valuable the work of a commentator on Sophocles, because it is traditionally respectable, and to say that a commentator on sunsets, as I once heard a poet described, is an effeminate dilettante. It is the motive that matters. Personally, I think that a man who has drifted into writing a commentary on Sophocles, because he happens to find that he can earn a living that way, is no more worthy of admiration than a man who earns his living by billiard-marking. Neither are necessary to the world. But the commentator and the billiard-marker are alike admirable, if they are working out a theory, if they think that thus and thus they can best help on the progress of the world.
"My own desire is, so to speak, to be a commentator on life, in one particular aspect. I think the world would be all the better if there were a finer appreciation of what is noble and beautiful, a deeper discrimination of motives, a larger speculation as to the methods and objects of our pilgrimage. I think the coarseness of the intellectual and spiritual palate that prevails widely nowadays is not only a misfortune, I think it is of the nature of sin. If people could live more in the generous visions of poets, if they could be taught to see beauty in trees and fields and buildings, I think they would be happier and better. Most people are obliged to spend the solid hours of the day in necessary work. The more sordid that work is, the more advisable it is to cultivate a perception of the quality of things. Every one has hours of recreation in every day; the more such hours are filled with pleasant, simple, hopeful, beautiful thoughts, the better for us all.
"Of course I may be quite wrong; I may be meant to find out my mistake; but I seem to discern in the teaching of Christ a desire to make men see the true values of life, to appreciate what is beautiful and tender in simple lives and homely relationships. The teaching of Christ seems to me to be uniquely and essentially poetical, and to point to the fact that the up-lifting of the human heart in admiration, hope, and love, is the cure for some, at least, of our manifold ills. That is my own theory of life, and I do not see that it is effeminate, or even unpractical; and it is a mere caricature of it to call it Epicurean. What does complicate life is the feeble acceptance of conventional views, the doing of things, not because one hopes for happiness out of them, not even because one likes them, but because one sees other people doing them. Even in the most sheltered existence, like my own, there are plenty of things which provide a bracing tonic against self-satisfaction. There are the criticism and disapproval of others, contempt, hostility; there are illness, and sorrow, and the fear of death. No one of a sensitive nature can hope to live an untroubled life; but to court unhappiness for the sake of its tonic qualities seems to me no more reasonable than to refuse an anaesthetic on the ground that it is interfering with natural processes.
"I don't know that I expect to convert you; but at least I am glad to make my position clear. I don't assume that I am in the right. I only know that I am trying to do what appears to me to be right, trying to simplify the issues of life, to unravel the tangle in which so many people seem to me to acquiesce helplessly and timidly."
XXXVI
The Mill—The Stream's Pilgrimage
There were days, of course, when Hugh's reflections took an irrepressibly optimistic turn. Such was a bright day in the late summer, when the sun shone with a temperate clearness, and big white clouds, like fragments torn from some aerial pack of cotton-wool, moved blithely in the sky. Hugh rode—he was staying at his mother's house—to a little village perched astride on a great ridge. He diverged from the road to visit the ancient church, built of massive stone and roofed with big stone-tiles; up there, swept by strong winds, splashed by fierce rains, it had grown to look like a crag rather than a building. By the side of it ran a little, steep, narrow lane, which he had never explored; he rode cautiously down the stony track, among thick hazel copses; occasionally, through a gap, he had a view of a great valley, all wild with wood; once or twice he passed a timbered farmhouse, with tall brick chimneys. The country round about was much invaded by new, pert houses, but there were none here; and Hugh supposed that this road, which seemed the only track into the valley, was of so forbidding a steepness that it had not occurred to any one to settle there. The road became more and more precipitous, and at the very bottom, having descended nearly three hundred feet, Hugh found himself in a very beautiful place. He thought he had never seen anything more sweetly, more characteristically English. On one side was a rough field, encircled by forest on all sides; here stood some old wooden sheds and byres; and one or two green rides passed glimmering into the thick copse, with a charming air of mystery, as though they led to some sequestered woodland paradise. To the right was a mill, with a great pond thick with bulrushes and water-lilies, full of water-birds, coots and moorhens, which swam about, uttering plaintive cries. The mill was of wood, the planks warped and weather-stained, the tiled root covered with mosses; the mill-house itself was a quaint brick building, with a pretty garden, full of old-fashioned flowers, sloping down to the pool; a big flight of pigeons circled round and round in the breeze, turning with a sudden clatter of wings; behind the house were small sandstone bluffs, fringed with feathery ashes, and the wood ran up steeply above into the sky. It looked like an old steel-engraving, like a picture by Morland or Constable. The blue smoke went up from the chimneys in that sheltered nook, rising straight into the air, lending a rich colour to the trees behind. Hugh thought it would be a beautiful place to live in, so remote from the world, in that still valley, where the only sound was the wind in the copses, the trickle of the mill-leat, and the slow thunder of the dripping wheel within. Yet he supposed that the simple people who lived there were probably unconscious of its beauty, and only aware that the roads which led to the spot were inconveniently steep. Still, it was hard to think that the charm of the place would not pass insensibly into the hearts, perhaps even into the faces, of the dwellers there.
He stood for a little to see the bright water leaping clear and fresh from the sluice. There was a delicious scent of cool river-plants everywhere. It was hard not to think that the stream, bickering out in the sun from the still pool, had a sense of joy and delight. It was passing, passing; Hugh could trace in thought every mile of the way; down the wooded valley it was bound, running over the brown gravel, by shady wood-ends and pasture-sides; then it would pass out into the plain, and run, a full and brimming stream, between high sandy banks, half hidden by the thick, glossy-leaved alders. Hugh knew the broad water-meadows down below, with the low hills on either side, where big water-plants grew in marshy places, and where the cattle moved slowly about through the still hours. Soon the stream would be running by the great downs—it was a river now, bearing boats upon it—till it passed by the wharves and beneath the bridges of the little town, and out into the great sea-flat, meeting, with how strange a wonder, the upward-creeping briny tide, with its sharp savours and its wholesome smell; till it flowed at last by the docks, where the big steamers lay unlading, blowing their loud sea-horns, past weed-fringed piers and shingly beaches, until it was mingled with the moving deep, where the waves ran higher on the blue sea-line, and the great buoy rolled and dipped above the shoal.